Marriage Equality on the March

At the end of last month, the Delaware legislature voted to approve a civil union bill. If Democratic Governor Jack Markell signs the bill, as he’s said he will, Delaware will become the newest state to grant same-sex partnerships all the same legal rights as heterosexual couples – joining, by my reckoning, ten others: Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey, Illinois, Oregon, Washington, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Iowa, plus the District of Columbia.

With a little luck and a lot of political elbow grease, my own state, New York, may be next. New York already recognizes same-sex marriages performed legally elsewhere, making its refusal to perform them itself more than a little ridiculous, since a gay or lesbian couple can just step across the border into Canada or any of the neighboring states that do. Still, a coalition of Republicans and a handful of religious-bigot Democrats have so far managed to keep marriage-equality bills bottled up in the State Senate, despite the fact that polls show large majorities of New Yorkers in support. A marriage-equality bill failed in the legislature in 2009, but since then, two Democrats who voted against it have been replaced by supportive votes. Six more votes are needed, and a statewide campaign is targeting 15 potential swing votes this summer, with support from Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Meanwhile, on the wider national level, the ground is shifting with dramatic speed. Back in 2009, I wrote about how supporters of marriage equality had become a plurality. Now, for the first time ever as far as I’m aware, several polls over the last few months have found that support for marriage equality has become the majority position in the United States of America!

Our losses in California and Maine were disappointing, but as these polls show, they’re only temporary setbacks. Support for marriage equality is growing every year, arguably even every month. Opponents of equality are trying to hold back the tide of history, but they can’t hope to plug every hole in the dike. And it’s increasingly obvious that they know this too. Their opposition seems more tired and perfunctory all the time, as if they recognize that they’re fighting a losing battle. In Delaware, only about 200 people, even by their own reckoning, showed up for a rally at the statehouse to oppose the civil-unions bill.

One last, feeble whine of protest came from two Christian pastors in Delaware, who filed an editorial last week which makes the following entirely secular arguments:

S.B. 30 is morally wrong and biblically incorrect… In our opinion, God’s design for marriage is between one man and one woman only… Lev. 18:22 tells us that “a man should not lie with another man as he does a woman because it is detestable”… Nowhere have we read in the Bible that it is all right for people of the same sex to marry… We believe civil unions between members of the same sex are contrary to the will of God.

They plead that if the bill passes, God “will judge us, and [we] don’t want our state and our nation to be judged with the wrath of God.” You have to feel sorry for these people, living in a self-imposed world of fear: their argument is essentially “Help, God is holding me hostage and he’ll kill me if you don’t meet his demands!”

Finally, I have to report on one more piece of news to make bigots cry: Louis J. Marinelli, a former spokesman and organizer for the anti-marriage National Association for Marriage, has publicly announced that he’s changed his mind and now supports civil marriage for gay and lesbian couples. That ground is shifting faster than anyone could have anticipated – and I’m willing to bet that, in the next few years, his won’t be the only high-profile defection from the ranks of those who oppose equality.

Adam Lee of Daylight Atheism

Adam Lee is an atheist writer and speaker living in New York City. He created Daylight Atheism to push back against undeserved privileging of religion and to encourage atheists to step out of their closets, into the daylight, and take our rightful place at the table of society’s discourse.